You Might Be The Problem: Adapt!
Unpredictable project performance. Workers that don’t lean in. Project managers that don’t step up. These are common complaints among construction business owners who long for employees to “figure it out,” (like they did themselves “back in the day”). As easy as it is to place blame on generational shifts, doing so is unlikely to increase business success. For most business owners, achieving better results requires ever more attention to communicating the expectations. Read on for pointers from pros.
Common Denominator: You?
When you own a business, the shortcomings of others are often a signal that you yourself need to change your approach. As operations consultant and owner of Pro-Accel, Jerry Aliberti, observes, multigenerational shifts are real, and require construction business owners to stop trying to turn the clocks backward, and instead, step up our own approach to leadership:
People view work differently now. They want a different life….You can spend the next fifteen years wishing that it wasn’t true, or you can spend the next six months adapting to it. One keeps you stuck. The other moves you forward. This blame game is costing you more than you think. Every hour you spend complaining about your team is an hour you’re not spending leading them. You’re exhausted because you’re working harder than everyone else, but the results keep slipping. Projects bleed profit. Deadlines get missed. Quality issues pile up. And instead of looking at what you control, you keep pointing at what you don’t. BUT you know what you can do? You can get crystal clear on what you expect, assign ownership to the outcomes that matter, and stop assuming people will just figure it out because that’s what you did.
Toward getting better results for your construction business going forward, a great place to begin is by providing more clarity to your team, ensuring that you are making goals and responsibilities explicit. Improving your own communications goes along way, as Kate Zabriskie explains at Construction Business Owner:
Imagine a team starting a project with energy and optimism. Ideas are flying, everyone’s ready to contribute and the excitement is high. But a few weeks in, the team is struggling, and the wind is out of their sails. People are frustrated, deadlines are slipping and, despite all the effort, they’re behind….When teams aren’t clear on goals, roles and tasks, even the most talented group can lose direction…..When roles and responsibilities are unclear, accountability fades. If something goes wrong, the response becomes “not my job”…..Blame circulates, and soon the team is more focused on defending actions than solving problems … .Clarity isn’t just nice-to-have — it’s what keeps teams aligned, productive and, yes, drama-free. When everyone understands the bigger purpose behind their work, their unique role and the tactical steps needed to get there, teams don’t just function — they thrive….
On LinkedIn, Jerry Albierti also emphasizes the importance of moving past vague goals, and providing clear and specific examples of what success looks like at every phase of every project, following these pointers:
- The first action is defining outcomes instead of hoping for them. Before a project starts, sit down with your team and get specific about what success looks like….
- Not vague goals. Actual measurable outcomes with deadlines and ownership. “We will have all submittals approved by the 15th of April, so long lead items can be ordered without delaying the schedule, and Sarah owns that.”
- When you build this into how you operate, you stop leaving performance up to interpretation. Your team knows exactly what winning looks like…
- …In your project kickoff, walk through every single risk and assign someone to own it. When you do this upfront, accountability becomes the norm instead of the exception. Your team starts operating proactively, and you stop spending every day reacting to chaos that could have been prevented.
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